From: David Vallner <david@...>
Date: 2006-08-28T07:44:26+09:00
Subject: Re: Why Ruby does not nead an ide

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> I think more to the point is that Eclipse has a lot of Java web
> developer muscle memory behind it. Suppose you took someone used to
> Eclipse and said, "OK -- here's Rails. You don't need any of that junk.
> Just open up a couple of konsole or xterm or cmd windows and a browser,
> edit a couple of config files and Ruby scripts in vi or emacs or
> notepad, and you're on the air!" :)

I'd scream very loudly and castrate anyone that would try and take 
project management, working sets, and the consistent CVS / SVN handling 
of the source control tools with a wooden spoon. I tried text-editor 
only Rails. (Didn't know about RadRails yet.) Broke within two days and 
did an 'aptitude install kdevelop' ;P

Seeing as J2EE actually pays my bills, that muscle memory isn't going 
anywhere fast.

> And Eclipse
> seems very much of the Java people, by the Java people and for the Java
> people.

To avoid misleading, I'll admit that it is. At least plugin wise, JDT 
does get by far the most attention from the core team past the 
integration work to make CDT behave nicely with Callisto. Although 
managed make CDT projects work surprisingly well to build wxWidgets 
based programs, and CDT plays along with the Cygwin GCC and everything 
around it quite nicely. Since only Java and now also C/C++ and various 
J2EE web development related languages are supported first-class, Ruby / 
Python / Perl support is only as good as the communities around the 
respective plugins make them. Here (if not sooner) my knowledge ends, it 
would probably take someone from the RDT / RadRails team to judge just 
how much the facilities of the language-neutral Eclipse Platform they 
made use of / have yet to fully exploit. Rakefile integration could be 
nice along the lines of the Ant integration (run as rake task launches). 
Integrating the database development tools of Eclipse 3.2 even nicer - 
exporting / importing / automatical synchronisation between the Rails 
database config file and the tool configuration.


> Right now KDevelop looks like my best bet,
> although I haven't looked at what the Gnome side of the house has to
> offer yet.

 From a brief look at it, precious little. The Gnome equivalent to 
KDevelop seems to be Anjuta. Anjuta's support for programming languages 
besided C and C++ isn't - one of the reasons making it very hard to 
decide which of the desktop environments to use. (I abhor any 
applications that don't integrate with the desktop.)

David Vallner